This has been a long, slow change for me, a paradigm shift from the gospel of self-improvement and personal righteousness–spanning every sector of one’s life from curtain bang styling to carbon footprint and interpersonal dramas–to the gospel of collective action. But I have found three questions very useful as tools in that general direction: 1.

It is often much more difficult in real life than even The Hunger Games to identify the enemy. The real enemy is actually not me at all, despite the many businesses who profit from keeping me at war with myself and/or my un-curl-able hair. The real enemy is not my inability to embrace a new style of denim or my poor table-scaping. It reminds me, though, of my favorite line from (forgive me) The Hunger Games: remember who the real enemy is. I might get them! I might also buy a new lipstick and organize my closet and employ some of the cleaning “hacks” served up to me on the websites I am trolling instead of Twitter. Pinterest will convince that instead your problem is that you are the only woman on earth who doesn’t have curtain bangs, or doesn’t know how to style them.Ĭurtain bangs are fine. In fact, like most women’s media, Pinterest is very, very good at convincing you to redirect from the real problems of your life– things like, I don’t know, rising income inequality, biodiversity loss, this horrifying article about women denied medically necessary reproductive care in Texas, the scary stuff Ron DeSantis is doing to higher education, the price of all those homes on Zillow that are also located in flood plains – and, of course, the intimate problems of our lives: illness, strained relationships, the slow leak in your right front tire. I fire up a new tab and hover my cursor over the search bar, wondering: How could I fix my life? I am less compelled to identify the Right Take about every news event, but I do find myself compelled to seek out a sort of aesthetic improvement.

I’m using the internet for something different, now. Correspondingly, I have noticed new and undesirable instincts in myself. So I have redirected a good deal of my previous Twitter time to things like trolling Pinterest for new haircut ideas and Zillowing homes in Ann Arbor, Detroit, and major coastal cities (yikes yikes yikes). I gave up Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for Lent, which I have so far kept to, even on Sundays– except of course that I have removed only the incentive, not the desire. Image: a stylist’s hands trimming short brown hair.

How do i cut my own curtain bangs